Fox host Harris Faulkner admitted, “We have no way of knowing … I just put that out there” after she and cohosts Katie Pavlich and Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery each suggested that Democrats had committed election fraud in Tuesday’s Ohio special election.

What prompted the baseless accusations was the news that one county in Ohio’s 12 Congressional district found several hundred previously uncounted votes. That bumped up Democrat Danny O’Connor’s tally by 190 votes. But he still trails Republican Troy Balderson by 1,564. With provisional and absentee ballots still to be counted, the race remains too close to call.

As I wrote yesterday, the tight race in this red district has Republicans alarmed about the upcoming midterms. If the discussion on Outnumbered is any guide, an effort to delegitimize Democratic wins has already begun.

It started right in Kennedy’s introduction. Her voice dripped with cynical sarcasm as she announced that the race had tightened due to the newly found votes. She went on to note that Democrats had lost 8 of the 10 special elections that have been held since Donald Trump took office. She did not note how Democrats have outperformed.

Kennedy added, “Nothing should be this tight for Democrats” because history points to an overwhelming win in the midterms. Never mind that that’s exactly what the Ohio race portended even before the recent found votes. FiveThirtyEight’s Micah Cohen wrote, “ Special elections have been a good sign for Democratic midterm hopes for awhile now, and Ohio 12 was no exception (even if Balderson hangs on)."

But I think Kennedy's insinuation was that since Democrats’ strategy isn’t working as it should, they’ll just steal elections instead.

Cohost Katie Pavlich made the fraud insinuation more explicit:

PAVLICH: I always find it really interesting that when they find these boxes of ballots in trunks of cars, in the back of the county building, that they always happen to get the Democrat closer to the Republican rather than getting the Republican closer to the Democrat, depending on who’s behind. That always seems to be the case. Quite amazing.

Cohost Harris Faulkner just happened to find Pavlich’s point fascinating.

FAULKNER: Just back to the point that you were making, Katie, about the last minute find of votes. I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary to do that but I do think in this instance – you know, Franklin County was one of the first places that they counted and that’s why the Democrat in that race was ahead for a bit. So I just – you know, I mean we have no way of knowing exactly what happened. I just put that out there so we have all of the facts to play with.

Right, just making sure “we” have “all of the facts” despite just acknowledging you have no facts to base this line of thinking on.

Pavlich, of course, was encouraged by Faulkner’s comment.

PAVLICH: Right, exactly. Interesting that they were so adamant about counting Franklin County first, as you were saying, but then all of a sudden, a few days later, when they’re desperately trying to match up the vote count and trigger a recount is what they’re really trying to do – they find this box of ballots.

Later, Pavlich, who is also an editor for Townhall, hypocritically lectured journalists about the importance of news judgment. “A journalist’s job is also to look at a situation or a press release or a tweet and find the newsworthy value in that,” she said.

Gee, ya think? Or does it only apply when you’re not making up conspiracy theories to smear Democrats?

Watch what could be a bad omen for how Fox will spin any blue wave in November below, from the August 9, 2018 Outnumbered.

When election results don’t go the Republicans way out pops the knee-jerk voter fraud excuse. How many times have we seen snowflake Trump dip into that well? The modern Republican Party lives in an alternate reality and the only way to make it work is to fuel it with crackpot conspiracy theories.

Faulkner saying “I just put that out there” reminds me of the often trod Fox News ‘source’ “some say”. Some vague, unsupported statement to rationalize posing some right-wing fantasy as fact or hard news.